Artificial diamond invented in 1950s has been known to have the highest hardness among materials on the earth, so widely applied to cutting and grinding tools owing to such property.
In particular, artificial diamond (hereinafter will be referred to as “diamond”) has been widely used in the stone processing field for cutting and grinding stones such as granite and marble and the construction field for cutting and grinding concrete structures.
A diamond tool generally has cutting tips, diamond particles which are distributed in the cutting tips and a steel core to which the cutting tips are fixed.
The cutting tips may include segment type and rim type tips.
FIG. 1 shows an example of a diamond tool having segment type tips.
As shown in FIG. 1, the segment type diamond tool includes a disk-shaped steel core 1, a number of cutting tips 2 and 3 fixed to the steel core 1 and a number of diamond particles randomly distributed in the cutting tips 2 and 3.
A method for fabricating the cutting tips where the diamond particles are randomly distributed generally utilizes powder metallurgy, by which the diamond particles 4 are mixed into metal powder and then sintered together with metal powder.
In such a fabrication method of the cutting tips via powder metallurgy, the diamond particles are not uniformly distributed among metal binder owing to differences in size and specific weight during mixing, forming and sintering of the fine diamond particles together with metal powder. Then, as shown in FIG. 1, a first cutting surface 5 has a too high particle density but a second cutting surface 6 has a too low particle density, thus arising the problem of random distribution of diamonds.
If the diamond particles are non-uniformly distributed in the cutting surfaces, the cutting rate of the cutting tip and the tool may be remarkably decreased.